Discredited Claims
The claim:
"The problem Mormonism encounters is that so many of its claims are well within the realm of scientific study, and as such, can be proven or disproven. To cling to faith in these areas, where the overwhelming evidence is against it, is willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication."[1]
The CES Letter then lists four things it says science has flatly disproven:[2]
- a worldwide flood about 4,500 years ago
- Noah's Ark holding a breeding pair of every animal species on earth
- the Tower of Babel that the Book of Mormon ties its Jaredite story to
- a young earth only a few thousand years old
In the CES Letter's telling, Latter-day Saint scripture and prophets are committed to a young earth, a planet-covering flood, and a literal Tower of Babel that scattered all human languages in a single moment. Science has buried each one. So either the science is wrong or the Church is, and the science here is not close.
The science is not wrong, and a faithful reader does not need it to be. There really was no flood that covered the planet around 2500 BC. More than one Church president taught that flood as a real, global event, and on the geography they were simply mistaken. So what does that admission actually cost? It costs the idea that those nineteenth-century sermons were ever binding doctrine, and that is the entire bill. Nothing the Church wrote into its scripture has to give an inch. Everything turns on the distance between what a leader says from the pulpit and what the Church formally commits itself to, and the Church had already drawn that line, in writing, before a word of this science existed.
A prophet can be a man of his time
Two presidents of the Church, an apostle, and a future Church president described Noah's flood as the literal baptism of the whole earth. Brigham Young said the planet "has been baptized with water, will be baptized by fire and the Holy Ghost."[3] Orson Pratt called the flood "a similitude of baptism for the remission of sins."[4] John Taylor said "the earth was immersed."[5] Joseph Fielding Smith, later a Church president himself, put it bluntly: it "was the baptism of the earth, and that had to be by immersion."[6] You cannot baptize half a planet by immersion. That language only works if the water covered everything, and these men plainly meant it to.
They were wrong about that. There is no signature of a global flood in the geological record from that period.
So how does a believer hold both: that these were prophets, and that they got a fact about the physical world wrong? The Restoration answered that question long before it came up here. Scripture itself says the Lord gave his commandments to his servants "in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24). A prophet does not stop being a man of his own century when he steps to the pulpit. On the gospel he speaks for God. On geology he often speaks as a nineteenth-century man who shared his era's reading of Genesis. And sorting the one from the other has rules: the Church wrote that distinction straight into the way it defines its own doctrine.
What actually counts as doctrine
In this Church, a leader's opinion does not become binding doctrine just because he is sincere or senior. There is a test, and the flood sermons never passed it.
For a teaching to become the official, binding doctrine of the Church, it has to be presented as revelation, accepted by the senior leaders together, and sustained by the membership, and it has to square with the scriptures already in the canon. The "baptism of the earth" was none of that. It was never put to the Church for a sustaining vote. The leaders never spoke on it with one voice. It was never canonized. It was a vivid sermon image that several leaders found compelling, which is a very different thing from a revelation the Church bound itself to.
The Church said this directly, and early. In 1931, the First Presidency settled an internal fight over exactly these questions, young earth versus old, death before Adam or not, with a written memorandum to the Church's leaders. It told them to "leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research."[7] The institution drew that line itself, decades before radiometric dating pinned the earth's age: these fields are not where the Church stakes its doctrine.
The same posture is on the Church's website today. Its 2016 history page reads, "The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution. Organic evolution... is a matter for scientific study,"[8] and a 2016 magazine answer for youth put it in three words: "Nothing has been revealed."[9]
In 1871, Brigham Young, the same man who preached the flood as a baptism, told the Saints that whether God made the world "in six days or in as many millions of years" was a matter no one could settle without revelation, and that if geologists had shown the earth to be hundreds of millions of years old, "they have good reason for their faith."[10] The breathing room the Church leaves on these questions was already in the toolbox generations before any geologist forced the issue.
The Hebrew word for "earth" usually means "land"
The text of Genesis claims less than the sermons did.
The word Genesis uses for "earth" in the flood story is the Hebrew eretz. It appears more than 2,500 times in the Hebrew Bible, and most of the time it does not mean the planet; it means a land, a country, a territory, the ground under your feet. It is the same word translated "land of Egypt" and "land of Canaan." The standard Hebrew dictionaries list "earth," "land," "ground," and even "the underworld" as its range.[11] Reading "all the earth" in the flood account as "the whole region," not "the whole globe," is not a Latter-day Saint escape hatch. It is just how the word works.
It fits how the writers saw the world, too. Ancient Israelites did not picture a round planet hanging in space. The idea of a spherical earth did not even enter Jewish thought until the fourteenth or fifteenth century.[12] When a Bronze Age writer said floodwaters covered "all the earth," he meant the world he knew: the whole visible land, horizon to horizon. A regional flood that wiped out an entire ancient civilization would have looked exactly that total to the people who lived through it, and they would have written it down in exactly these words.
All the theology of the story asks for, God's judgment, Noah's faith, the covenant and the rainbow afterward, is a flood, and the region had real ones.
Even Latter-day Saint apostles who were trained scientists said as much. John A. Widtsoe, an apostle with a chemistry PhD, wrote in 1943 that "the exact nature of the flood is not known. We set up assumptions, based upon our best knowledge, but can go no further."[13] That is an apostle, in print, declining to make the flood the global event the sermons made it. The careful institutional voice and the sweeping sermon voice were both in the Church the whole time, and only one of them was ever doctrine.
Noah's bears
The CES Letter's sharpest single example is the bears. It points out that you cannot get the sun bear, the polar bear, and the grizzly from one pair of bears on the Ark a few thousand years ago, because evolution does not move that fast. Bear species split apart over hundreds of thousands of years, not centuries.[14]
The genetics there is sound. It is just aimed at a target the Church never set up. The idea that the Ark held a breeding pair of every species, which then rapidly diversified into today's animals after the water drained, is a specific Protestant young-earth-creationist model. The Latter-day Saint Church has never taught it, never required it, and its own scientists reject it along with everyone else in biology. On a regional flood, Noah preserved the livestock and wild animals of his own corner of the ancient Near East, not two of every bear on the planet. The bear argument knocks down a building the Church does not live in.
This is the pattern across most of the CES Letter's science list. The arguments work beautifully against young-earth creationism, the system that insists the Bible's first chapters are a science textbook. They just keep hitting a doctrine the Latter-day Saint Church declined to adopt. The Church reads the Bible through a different lens by design: the Articles of Faith accept it "as far as it is translated correctly," which leaves no room for the kind of inerrancy a young-earth reading demands.
A date the Church printed but never revealed
Unlike the sermons, the age-of-the-earth claim rests on something the Church still prints. The CES Letter points to the Latter-day Saint Bible Dictionary, which carries a chronology table reading "4000 B.C. – Fall of Adam."[15] The earth is about 4.54 billion years old. So here, the critic says, is a young-earth date sitting right inside modern Latter-day Saint scripture.
Two things are true at once. The first is that the date is not revealed and never was. It comes straight from Archbishop James Ussher, who in 1650 added up biblical genealogies and calculated creation to the year 4004 BC. Publishers later printed his numbers in the margins of King James Bibles, and they rode along into Latter-day Saint reference materials in 1979.[16] The Bible Dictionary even says so about itself, right in its introduction: its entries are "subject to reevaluation" and the book "is not intended as an official statement of Church doctrine."[17]
Nothing the Church canonized puts the earth at 6,000 years old. The one scripture critics reach for, Doctrine and Covenants 77, speaks of "the seven thousand years of [the earth's]... temporal existence,"[18] and the Church's own manual explains that this means the span of human history since the Fall, not the age of the planet.[19] "Temporal existence" was never a claim about geology.
The second is that a study-aid date the Church has known was Ussher's guess since at least 1871 is still bound inside the printed scriptures, and a member flipping to the chronology table has not necessarily read the disclaimer buried in the introduction. That is a real inconsistency, and a small note in the table flagging the date as Ussher's rather than revealed would be an improvement. It is the kind of loose end the doctrine-vs-opinion framework explains without fully tidying up. But "the Church left an old scholar's date in a study aid" is a very long way from "Latter-day Saint scripture teaches a 6,000-year-old earth." It does not.
When leaders got the facts wrong
The two hardest pieces of this are the flood sermons and a single verse in the Book of Mormon.
The flood sermons are the piece already on the table. This is not a case where critics misread a verse. Prophets and apostles of the Church stated a positive claim about the physical world, that the flood drowned the entire planet, and that claim is false. The framework can carry that weight, because the teaching was never canonized and the 1931 First Presidency had already told leaders to leave geology to the geologists. But carrying it still means granting, out loud, that Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, John Taylor, and Joseph Fielding Smith were wrong about a fact.
For much of the twentieth century, the version most members actually learned, from books like Joseph Fielding Smith's Man: His Origin and Destiny and Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine, was the strict young-earth, global-flood one.[20][21] The careful, open reading lived in back issues and a memo most members never saw; the strict reading lived on the shelf in the front room, in the book a family actually reached for. To say everyone in that era walked away with the careful version would simply not be true.
Faithful scholars have done the most serious work on the flood language, rereading "baptism of the earth" as theological metaphor rather than a lesson in geography, but they arrive there by treating those sermons as exactly the leader opinion the framework always said they were.[22]
The single verse is the other, and it is the only piece of the four anchored in actual scripture rather than in sermons. The other three claims, the flood, the Ark, the age of the earth, lean on things the Church never canonized. The Tower of Babel is different, because the Book of Mormon ties itself to it. Ether 1:33 places the migration of the Jaredites, one of the book's peoples, "at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people."[23] Read straight as modern history, that points to a single moment, around 2200 BC, when all human languages split apart, and the linguistic record contradicts it: Sumerian, Egyptian, and Akkadian were already fully developed, separate written languages well before that date.
Faithful scholars read the verse in three ways.
- Some read "at the time" as the framing of Moroni, the ancient editor who compiled the record, laid over a real Bronze Age migration.
- Some read the Jaredite "great tower" as an ancient Mesopotamian temple-tower, not specifically the later Babel story, set against the dynastic collapses of the era, like the fall of Akkad around 2150 BC.
- One recent study argues Moroni built the whole Brother of Jared account as a deliberate mirror-image of Babel: where Babel's builders sought "to make us a name," the central Jaredite figure is left unnamed; where Babel's languages were confounded, the Jaredites' language was preserved, a sophisticated literary move you would expect from a real ancient author, not a frontier forger.[24]
None of these closes the question completely, and a reader's confidence in them rests partly on already trusting the Book of Mormon as ancient. The full treatment, including the strongest form of the objection, is in the in-depth version.
There are also two questions this page deliberately hands off. The claim that nothing died anywhere before Adam, and the Neanderthal-DNA question, belong with the Fall and the meaning of "first man." Those are worked through in the companion article on evolution and the Fall.
Can the Church take a correction?
Every faith that says anything about the physical world will eventually get some piece of it wrong, so "did a leader ever miss a scientific fact" is the wrong yardstick. The real question is whether the tradition can absorb the correction and keep standing, and whether the thing being corrected was ever holding up the roof in the first place.
By that measure the Church holds up unusually well. It produced James E. Talmage, an apostle with a geology PhD who taught an ancient earth and animal death long before Adam from the Tabernacle pulpit, with the First Presidency's blessing, in the very same era it produced Joseph Fielding Smith arguing the opposite, and it let both men speak. It funds a university, BYU, that has taught mainstream evolution as standard science since 1971.
Its current and former leaders include working scientists who saw no war between the two: Henry Eyring, a chemist who won the National Medal of Science, wrote that "since the Gospel embraces all truth, there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion,"[25] and Russell M. Nelson, a heart surgeon before he was Church president, said the same thing dedicating a science building in 2015: "There is no conflict between science and religion."[26]
The CES Letter opens its own science section with a line from Eyring, then spends the next several pages fighting the very position Eyring spent his life holding. A church committed to young-earth creationism does not promote these men or build these buildings.
And while a few sermons about the flood's geography came and went, the things the Church actually canonized never moved: that we are the children of God, that Adam and Eve were real people who carried the covenant, that the Fall was part of the plan, that Christ atoned for all of it. None of those is a claim geology can touch.
Good men misjudged the geography of Noah's flood, and the Church, given time, said so. The mistake stayed an opinion. The Church never made it doctrine.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," p. 111. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," nos. 1–4, pp. 110–111. ↩︎
Brigham Young, discourse, 12 June 1860, Journal of Discourses 8:83. "This earth … has been baptized with water, will be baptized by fire and the Holy Ghost." ↩︎
Orson Pratt, discourse, 1880, Journal of Discourses 21:323. The full passage reads: "a great flow of water came, the great deep was broken up, the windows of heaven were opened from on high, and the waters prevailed upon the face of the earth, sweeping away all wickedness and transgression—a similitude of baptism for the remission of sins." ↩︎
John Taylor, discourse, 30 November 1884, Journal of Discourses 26:74–75. "The earth was immersed … a period of baptism." ↩︎
Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, 3 vols., compiled by Bruce R. McConkie (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954–1956), 2:320. "It was the baptism of the earth, and that had to be by immersion." ↩︎
First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, Charles W. Nibley), memorandum to the Quorum of the Twelve, the First Council of Seventy, and the Presiding Bishopric, 5 April 1931. Quoted in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 75. Documentary history in Sherlock 1980 and Keller 1982. ↩︎
"Organic Evolution," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution. ↩︎
"What does the Church believe about evolution?" New Era, October 2016. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2016/10/to-the-point/what-does-the-church-believe-about-evolution. ↩︎
Brigham Young, discourse, 14 May 1871, Journal of Discourses 14:115–117. ↩︎
Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907; reprinted Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), s.v. eretz (אֶרֶץ) and balal (בָּלַל). ↩︎
Duane E. Jeffery, "Noah's Flood: Modern Scholarship and Mormon Traditions," Sunstone 134 (October 2004): 27–45. https://sunstone.org/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/134-27-45.pdf. ↩︎
John A. Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1943), 127. ↩︎
Verena E. Kutschera, Tobias Bidon, Frank Hailer, Julia L. Rodi, Steven R. Fain, and Axel Janke, "Bears in a Forest of Gene Trees: Phylogenetic Inference Is Complicated by Incomplete Lineage Sorting and Gene Flow," Molecular Biology and Evolution 31, no. 8 (August 2014): 2004–2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msu186. ↩︎
"Chronology of the Old Testament," Bible Dictionary, The Holy Bible (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013 edition; also 1979, 1981, 1995). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bd/chronology-of-the-old-testament. ↩︎
James Ussher, Annales Veteris Testamenti, A Prima Mundi Origine Deducti (London, 1650), reverse-engineered the date of creation to 23 October 4004 BC at 6 PM by adding biblical genealogies. Ussher's chronology was inserted into King James Bible margins by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publishers and absorbed into Latter-day Saint reference materials when the 1979 Latter-day Saint edition of the King James Bible was prepared. ↩︎
"Introduction," Bible Dictionary, The Holy Bible (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013). Online: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bd/introduction. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 77:6–7. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2017), chapter 29 ("Doctrine and Covenants 77–80"). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual-2017/chapter-29-doctrine-and-covenants-77-80. ↩︎
Joseph Fielding Smith, Man: His Origin and Destiny (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954). Explicit defense of young-earth creationism, no pre-Adamic death, global flood, and approximately 6,000-year earth as Church doctrine. ↩︎
Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1958; 2nd ed., 1966). Treated belief in a global flood and young-earth creationism as required by the gospel. Mormon Doctrine was widely treated by lay members as quasi-canonical despite repeated First Presidency discomfort with it. ↩︎
Paul Y. Hoskisson and Stephen O. Smoot, "Was Noah's Flood the Baptism of the Earth?" in Let Us Reason Together: Essays in Honor of the Life's Work of Robert L. Millet, ed. J. Spencer Fluhman and Brent L. Top (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 163–188. https://rsc.byu.edu/let-us-reason-together/was-noahs-flood-baptism-earth. ↩︎
Ether 1:33. ↩︎
Walker Wright, "The Man with No Name: The Story of the Brother of Jared as an Anti-Babel Polemic," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 62 (2024): 319–333. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/the-man-with-no-name-the-story-of-the-brother-of-jared-as-an-anti-babel-polemic. ↩︎
Henry Eyring, The Faith of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1967), 12, 31. Internet Archive scan: https://archive.org/details/faithofscientist0000eyri. ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, remarks at the dedication of the BYU Life Sciences Building, 9 April 2015. Reported in Church News, 14 April 2015. ↩︎